Description
Book SynopsisA collection of prose poems that chronicles the family life of two cancer survivors. Dan O’Brien’s powerful companion to
Our Cancers catalogs the recovery of a cancer survivor, whose wife has recently survived her own cancer, as he returns to his daily life while raising a young daughter. This prose-poem sequence is a true survivor’s notebook, using photos and the tools of memoir to evoke how disaster can constellate our past, present, and future.
In his poems, plays, and nonfiction, Dan O’Brien has explored, as he says in a 2023 interview, “how trauma shatters identity, and in its aftermath we reconfigure and rewrite, as it were, the story of who we were and are and maybe will be.” In highly personal poems reminiscent of dramatic monologues, as well as shorter lyric fragments, the protagonist reconsiders the people and places he knew before his illness, including his estranged family and others with cancer. While looking back he moves forward again, resuming his career as a writer and teacher, revisiting Ireland, and making a kind of pilgrimage to the Holy Land. There is a confiding and at times comical tone in these poems as O’Brien awakens to the delights, absurdities, and wonders of existence, and as he and his wife work through the aftershocks of their trauma toward a deeper love.
With text and image,
Survivor’s Notebook shows how we go on, with resilience, gratitude, and joy, when “the emergency’s elsewhere” now.
Trade Review"O’Brien’s
Survivor’s Notebook is a beautiful little hybrid book that calls itself poetry, though the paragraph-length entries inside are more memoir. . . .This is a very honest work. There are personal phobias and fears, secrets and longings exposed. . . . Part celebration, part extrication, fans of personal stories about imperfect lives will enjoy this brave and bittersweet book." -- Jesi Bender * Exacting Clam *
"Earlier this season, Acre Books released Dan O’Brien’s
Survivor’s Notebook, a visceral collection of prose poems. In wielding the tools of memoir, O’Brien illuminates the traumas and triumphs of two cancer survivors to profound effect. This complement to O’Brien’s 2021 collection
Our Cancers is as inspiring as it is skilled." * New England Review *
“
Our Cancers is an excellent example of Shelley’s secret alchemy, which turns ‘to potable gold the poisonous waters which flow from death through life.’ . . . Writing the truth, [O’Brien] says, ‘saved him.’ And it has produced an exquisite and terrible beauty in these pages.” -- Praise for 'Our Cancers' * Stephen Wilson, Times Literary Supplement *
“O’Brien explains that his obligation as a writer is ‘To tell others the truth, as skillfully as possible. To make art out of pain. To heal.’
Our Cancers tells his truth not only skillfully but masterfully, making from pain a lasting chronicle of art that traces fragmentary moments of healing over time.” -- Praise for 'Our Cancers' * J. D. Schraffenberger, North American Review *
“These are sparse and beautiful poems to live by.” -- Praise for 'Our Cancers' * Sophie Thomas, Magma Poetry *
“A master class in surviving through art.” -- Praise for 'A Story That Happens' * Margaret Gray, Los Angeles Times *
“Powerful. . . . This is a book for our times.” -- Praise for 'A Story That Happens' * Alice Jolly, Times Literary Supplement *
